when suddenly … nothing happened. June 24, 2010
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Wolcottville.add a comment
They have closed Bixler Lake because E. Coli from migratory fowl droppings is blooming in the warmth and wet. It is June, and already the humidity of summer is miserable. When I step outside, the air is dense, heavy, thick, hard to breathe. By ten in the morning the birds are quiet and exhausted. Even the willow by the lake sags.
Inside my house, I closed the window blinds to shut out the glare, and I set the thermostat to 75, the tipping point. Below 75, I feel too much guilt for wasting polluting, coal-fired electricity. Above 75, and I may as well open the windows and sweat on the computer keyboard. It is unusual when a moral dilemma like this can be reduced to a measurable statistic, but there it is. Seventy-five.
In my little environment-controlled bubble, I sat working at the computer, when suddenly my insides turned wobbly, that odd sensation one gets while giving blood just before you pass out. Perhaps 75 was not low enough. Perhaps too much Father’s Day cake or not enough sleep. I felt alert. My eyes were focused. And soon it passed, forgotten.
Dawn called that morning on the cell phone. Looking out my sunny window, I heard rain storm on the phone twenty miles to the south. Not so unusual. Pretty Big Long Lake often defies the local weather patterns. Dawn had barely started talking to me when suddenly she screamed and laughed. I briefly heard the voice of her friend, another parent who volunteered to help her at the school garden. I listened to their garbled voices, and then Dawn remembered me, said she’ll call later, and hung up.
Later at dinner, she explained that a summer rain shower snuck up on them. She had called me from the shelter of the car when her friend unexpectedly yanked open the passenger door and jumped in, soaking wet. Gravity pulled at the smile lines around her eyes as she told the story; she was as tired and as sleep-deprived as I was. More so, because she works in the sun and humidity all day. I sent her to bed after dinner, and she gratefully agreed.
I read books to the children, brushed their distracted teeth, and sang them to sleep in their beds. For a moment, I had the house to myself, quiet, no obligations, and decided to do so research on the internet when suddenly the doorbell rang. My next door neighbor stood there with a deep furrow between her eyes. She lives alone with a cat and a weather alert radio. The lights in her house are often burning long after we go to bed, for she doesn’t sleep well. I let her in, signaling to talk quietly since everyone was asleep, but her news spilled out before her foot was in the door.
A big storm was coming. Hail. Flood. Winds over 90 miles per hour. Goshen had been hit badly by winds. Lots of damage. The storm was moving east at 55 miles per hour. She didn’t say tornado. She didn’t have to. We knew the possibility, even though we didn’t like to admit it. No one on the lake has a basement. She started to tell me about using one of the garages as a shelter, but I was calculating and didn’t listen.
I can drive to Goshen in one hour. My average speed is just about 55 mph. And the storm had already left Goshen.
I stepped outside to smell the sky, and the back of my throat glazed with burnt ozone and fear. It was 9:00 PM, not quite sundown, but from horizon to horizon the sky was a glowing, metallic color, like a television screen the moment after it is turned off and the electricity is still draining out of it. The humidity was no longer pressing on my body, but rather pulling on it. The hairs on my arms stood out.
My mantra for such moments, which I do not often get to practice, is “Strive to be the calmest person in the room.” I wanted information, but we have no television, so I headed to the computer. The internet was down. Not a good sign. I turned on the radio and instantly heard the irritating buzz of the emergency broadcast system warning. A line of squalls with hail, flash flooding, and possible tornadoes was bearing down from the west. The announcer read the list of counties: St. Joseph, Marshall, Elkhart, Kosciusko, Lagrange…
Lagrange. Our county. I got moving. The announcer continued into Michigan and Ohio, but I was already preparing the emergency kit I should always have on hand. The little hater in my head, the useless, uninvited voice started screaming, “Idiot! You should always have an emergency kit on hand.”
“Shut Up!” I told myself and start putting things in bags.
Water. Apples. Crackers.
“Please take shelter. The best place is in a basement under a workbench or sturdy table.”
Shoes. Car keys. Flashlights.
“If you have no basement, head to an interior room away from windows.”
Clothing. Swiss Army Knife. Batteries. Transistor radio.
“Do not go out to watch the storm.”
The wind picked up and the lights flickered but didn’t go out. Regretfully, I woke Dawn and let her know what was happening. We would need to move the children, but without waking them. They were nervous enough in ordinary storms, and they would have panicked to hear the word “tornado” in earnest. Dawn collected pillows and blankets and made little nests on the bathroom floor for them, and we carried them in and lay them still asleep in corners.
Dawn found the first aid kits, extra clothes, candles, books, knitting. The bathtub started to fill up with anything we could think we might need for the next few days or could not live without.
I began opening windows. During a tornado, tremendous low pressure builds up outside. If your house is sealed, it can literally burst like an overinflated balloon, usually through the doors, windows, and roof. It is better to open your windows and let the winds trash your furniture and books than to scatter broken glass and splinters everywhere.
When everything we could think to do was done, we headed to the bathroom to wait. The lights were still on. Dawn crocheted by the door, her legs mingled with the children’s. I sat on the closed toilet seat and fiddled with my old Peace Corps transistor AM/FM/shortwave radio. I used earphones, so as not wake the children, and relayed information to Dawn.
A tornado warning for our county for another 45 minutes. The storm had not arrived yet, but it was moving so fast that, whatever was going to happen, it was going to start and end in the next 45 minutes. Stay tuned for updates.
Then music. Country music. A song by Blake Shelton.
“Yeah, tomorrow can wait ’til tomorrow, it’s all about tonight.”
My local DJ had a twisted sense of humor.
Ten minutes later, the wind arrived in earnest. At first nothing and then a sucking rush, followed by a rattling, and then lightning and rain on the roof, all within ten seconds. But muted. Not scary. Not worse than a regular summer thunderstorm. The bathroom was in the very center of the house and several walls separated us from the noise in every direction. The lights flickered again and went out for just two seconds before returning. Dawntook a breath, pulled her crochet hook out, and captured a loose thread.
Reports came in on the radio. A tractor trailer overturned by winds in Fort Wayne. Funnel clouds sited in Allen county. A barn destroyed in Goshen. I did not repeat all this. Instead, Dawn and I chatted about summer vacation plans, as blithely as though we were at a station waiting for a train to arrive. And in a way, we were. We had half an ear cocked for that tell-tale train noise everyone says they hear just before a tornado strikes. And then suddenly …
Nothing happened.
In about twenty minutes, what little noise we could hear died down. No more hail or lightning. The wind and rain were barely noticeable. On the radio, the warnings moved east into Ohio. I didn’t hear Lagrange county anymore on the reports. Magical Pretty Big Long Lake had been spared. About then Rose woke up.
She looked around, squinting and disoriented. “Mama,” she asked, “What am I doing in the bathroom?”
We bundled the children back in bed, leaving the pillows and paraphernalia in the bathroom. They scarcely noticed the interruption and were soon sleeping. Dawn went to bed too, but I grabbed an umbrella to check on our insomniac neighbor.
Her door was open, a light and the glow of the television within. She jumped at the sound of me stubbing my toe on her step in the dark. But soon I was seated by her muted television, amiably chatting about the averted disaster while the rain fell outside. From my seat, I could see her bathroom contained a similar, hastily-prepared pile of things. She began to tell me how it was never like this before. Never. Maybe a high wind once in summer, but not this kind of thing. It was odd. A wind storm last week knocked out a tree and some people lost power, and now this. And did you know there was a earthquake in Canada today? They said they felt it in Fort Wayne.
No, I hadn’t heard, I said. But I smiled. I had felt it too.
Bird nest after storm
My Debut May 12, 2010
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Music, Wolcottville.2 comments
The truncated name on the caller ID belonged to my children’s music teacher. Who is also my wife’s coworker in the gardens at school. Who is also our landlady.
It’s an interesting thing I’ve learned about life in rural America. A sparser population means that people take several roles in each other’s lives. It is a bit like a community theatre production. The man playing Polonius also plays Osric and a banner-holding soldier and either Rosancrantz or Guildenstern – either will do in a pinch. And if two of these characters have a scene together, then some of his lines get cut and he deals with it, preferably with grace. Mere civility is not enough to soothe the inevitable ruffled feathers. People here are cheerful and friendly because they are bred that way through ruthless social selection.
I answered the phone. Cheerfully.
“Hey,” she said, “sorry to bother you, but didn’t you tell me at the school hoedown that you knew some dance callers?”
“Sure,” I replied confidently. Although really, in this part of country, they are as rare as Florida snowflakes. But they do exist. And I know him.
“The art festival is holding a private party for their volunteers, and their caller canceled at the last minute. Do you think you could call the art teacher and give her your information?”
Fort Wayne holds an annual festival focusing on Art and Music in education. It is held downtown at the convention center and several schools, including my childrens’ school, participate. A week earlier, on a cold, windy Saturday, we had infiltrated the glass fishbowl of the downtown convention center to wander through the water color paintings, found art collages, and tin foil sculptures and to listen to local school bands and watch their folk dance ensembles. Foreign guests are invited as well, and we listened to a Japanese Kamishibai storyteller, overheard a German trio singing hippie folksongs, and watched a troupe of teenage professional dancers from Poland in colorful green, red, and white costumes with ribbons flailing as they spun.
A week later, to thank all these people and countless volunteers, the organizers wanted to host a private party. And as a treat, there would be real American folk dancing.
I learned this after two hours of tracing back the path of phone requests, speaking with various artists, organizers, and volunteers, leaving messages and answering calls. I might have given up, except that, along the way, I learned that there was no band either, and a thought grew in my head.
This might be my chance to debut as a dance fiddler. The venue seemed safe. An audience of polite foreigners who would not know what Old Time music was supposed to sound like. If I screwed up, what were the odds I‘d ever be in Poland to see any of them again?
When I found the person who was organizing the party, she sounded surprised to hear from me. She had given up hope days ago of finding anyone, and had let the matter drop. But I was not about to let her give up, and my enthusiasm was infectious.
“Now, I have to be honest with you,” she said. “We are a volunteer arts organization, and we can’t pay you anything.”
“I understand. That’s OK with me, but I will have to check with the other band members.”
“Sure, of course. We will certainly feed you dinner.”
My banjo player, Donald, said he would do it. He likes getting paid, but he’ll bite like a young fish at any excuse to play Old Time music. My guitar player, Jake was a preacher, and would do it for friendship, not money. Only he could not arrive until after work, which, given his ministry duties, might mean midnight. And my caller, Bruce, said he had already been asked a week ago by the same organizers to do this gig. At the time, he had turned them down because he doesn’t work with recorded music. Now, with a live band in the offing, he agreed.
We all coalesced the following night at a church off Coldwater Road. The social hall was half filled with long tables covered in plastic table cloths and laden with pulled pork and salad and something potato saladish. They soon filled with young Polish teenagers, older Asian couples, American volunteers and others. Bruce immediately sat in a far corner and began flipping through dance cards. Donald hung close to me, not so much from an unwillingness to socialize with foreign strangers, as an unwillingness to socialize with anyone who did not speak Old Time music. The organizers, seeing us wallflowers, took us in hand, thanking us profusely, and made sure we got something to eat. They sat us next to a trio of German gentleman who could have passed for Peter, Paul, and Mary if they had not all been men. One had a gray beard and gray chest hairs escaping over the top of a patchwork vest. The second had a pony tail to his waist. And the last, clean-shaven and balding, covered his delicate neck with a checkered bandanna. I introduced myself to the first, and asked how they were connected to the FAME festival, but he was not the English speaker. The checkered bandanna informed me that they were musicians from Germany.
Ah! The trio I saw at the festival. I remembered them. And then I began to perspire. It’s one thing to debut as a dance fiddler for dancers. It’s another thing to do so for professional musicians.
“Oh, really?” I said. “Well, perhaps you gentlemen might care to join us later when we play for the dance?”
They nodded and smiled in an uncommitted fashion that was either polite demure or mere incomprehension. Donald, seeing my discomfort, rushed to the rescue and took the opportunity to orate on the history and geography of Old Time music in America, his favorite topic. This generated more of the same polite nodding from the trio which I joined in. Later, when they had left to get dessert, Donald snorted and said, “They look like old rock n roll stars!” He was not whispering.
At the end of the hall, in what I suppose was the original nave of the church, three folding metal chairs had been set up for us, and a young Polish teenager was setting up sound equipment. As we tuned up our instruments, he chattered and laughed with his friends, until we asked him a question, and then he looked sullenly deferential. Typical teenager.
We sat. We waited. This was a party, not just a dance, and the verbal socializing wasn’t over. There was no schedule, no script. While Bruce shuffled through his dance cards for the fourth time, we watched from across the room as the dessert and coffee gave way to announcements – the tedious thanking of all the volunteers and the good will orations between the “the nations of Germany, Japan, and Poland.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Donald suddenly, who had been uncharacteristically silent up to this point. “It’s the Axis powers!”
Fortunately, we were separated from the crowd by at least 30 feet.
Finally, they announced us, the evening’s entertainment – traditional American folk dancing, led by a traditional American caller with a traditional American band. Made up, they neglected to mention, of a traditional American professor of mechanical engineering, a traditional American computer programmer, and a traditional American business development executive. Our preacher had not yet arrived.
Bruce managed to entice a crowd on to the floor, mostly the Polish teenagers, who, as typical teenagers I suppose, weren’t going pass up an opportunity to licitly touch each other in public. Bruce politely declined the help of a translator that had been foisted upon him and began walking them through the figures.
“Hold hands in a ring… A ring … A circle. Like that, yes. Now, everyone take four steps into the middle.”
No one moved. Puzzled looks and stifled giggles. Bruce interposed himself between two people and, grabbing their hands, carried them along with him to the center, saying, “Four steps! One! Two! Three! Four!”
Thirty light bulbs went off over thirty heads. The crowd aaahed and began to surge forward. “Wan! Too! Tuh-ree! Foor!” they chorused.
Stamp, Stamp, Stamp, Stamp echoed their feet on the linoleum. The dance came together, one figure at a time. They had never danced this kind of dance before, but they were professionals and they picked it up very quickly. A second walk-through (“Wan! Too! Tuh-ree! Foor!”), and they had it. Then Bruce turned to me with a smile and said, “And now, we’ll dance it with music.”
All eyes on me, and for a moment, I blanked. Donald, fingers poised for plucking, looked at me. “What are we playing?” he asked.
“Um. What key are you in?” I stalled.
“A or D, take your pick.”
Something easy. Something I had down cold. Something I could play in my sleep. Something I could play unconscious. Not an unlikely possibility.
“OK. Angeline the Baker. I guess they haven’t heard it a billion times yet.”
Four little potatoes and off I went. I hadn’t stopped to position the fiddle properly and ended up grinding my teeth and jaw into the chin rest for ten minutes to hold it in place, but other than that it went fine. The dancers were a little too new and self-conscious to whoop and holler, but they yelled “Wan! Too! Tuh-ree! Foor!” with enthusiasm, and laughed at their own mistakes. When it was over, no one walked off the floor.
“Find another partner,” Bruce called, and they did.
Lucky for me, Bruce is very good at what he does, and then Jake showed up for the next tune. As soon as we started playing the second dance, I realized it was going to be OK. I had needed that guitar. Mind you, I love a good banjo player, and there are some tunes that a guitar should gracefully bow out of. But really, for a hollering good dance, you need a guitar. Or a bass.
The crowd was warming up, chattering, laughing. For the third dance, the Germans took up my invitation – two more guitars and a plugged-in acoustic bass gently feeling out the chords before playing full throttle. The church throbbed with rhythm. The dancers loved it.
During the third dance, the strings on my bow slackened in the new warmth and humidity of the room, and I tightened them afterward. After the fourth dance, the dancers were ready for a break. Half of them disappeared out of a side door as though going to smoke cigarettes, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It had been thoroughly enjoyable and hideously stressful, and I wanted a break too. Bruce began to rifle through his cards again, while I chatted with Jake. We had just decided to quietly run through our next tune for after the break, when the German with the kerchief round his neck came up. His English tingled with Commonwealth precision.
“If you don’t mind,” he smiled, “we were thinking of playing a song or two for everyone after the break.”
It wasn’t really a request, but it was politely communicated. We weren’t going to obstruct. It wasn’t our party. “Please do,” I said. Cheerfully.
Then the young dancers came back and upstaged both us and the Germans by starting a Polish party dance. They sang a little six-bar ditty (“la-la-lalalala”), and then the leader grabbed another person who held onto his waist. They sang again while these two marched about, and then they added a third dancer. And so on until the whole room was dancing an Eastern European conga line. Then they sang a rowdy song. Then they lined up in rows, chorale fashion, and sang a traditional anthem to their mothers.
Bruce watched with a nervous smile. You could tell he was enjoying the performance, and yet wasn’t sure if he was supposed to intervene or not. But as it turned out, the decision was taken away from him. The Germans figured they had waited long enough, and one of them leaped in to give a grand speech about friendship between their cultures and then led everyone in a German folk song that no one knew the words to. They followed this up with a second song. And a third song, switching to English.
“Valdereee! Valderaaaah! Valdereeeee! Valdera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha….”
At this point, Donald’s impatience broke through. He yelled in my ear over the noise, “Are we gonna get to play anymore?”
I shrugged. Threading my way around the Germans and their knapsacks on their backs, I found the organizer chatting with some of the volunteers. When I caught her attention, she glanced at the singing Germans, and her smile folded into a curve of embarrassment and apology. She didn’t actually know if we were going to play anymore. She guessed the artists had taken over their own party; they had been touring together for a couple of weeks. But she was very grateful that we came.
I found Bruce by one of the speakers in the corner. He knew the score. His cards were already packed up, and he watched the performance with a serendipitous smile.
“Bruce,” I said. “It looks like the dance is over for the evening. I’m sorry. That was a lot of your time for just four dances.”
Bruce didn’t take his eyes off the musicians, who had now coaxed some dancers onto the floor. A background cacophony of Polish and German voices filled the room, and Bruce gently raised his voice loud enough for me to hear him. He spoke in short phrases, mesmerized by the bizarre non-sequitor he was witnessing. “It’s … not a problem… This is truly … amazing… I hope they … bring us back next year.”
Jake had already packed up too, and I made the same apology. He protested that it was not a problem and he thanked me for letting him play, and though I knew he meant it, he was a preacher. In good conscience, what else could he have said?
Donald, however, was still sitting with his banjo in his lap and a look of sour chewing tobacco. When I broke the news to him, his thoughts were plain on his face – Three hours without pay for four measly tunes. But then he smiled grimly, and with good-natured stoicism, he reassured me it wasn’t a problem.
“You know how it is,” he told me. “Give the Germans an inch, and they’ll take a country.”
Irony February 18, 2010
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Wolcottville.add a comment
Last weekend was the Ohio Environmental Food and Farm annual conference in Granville, Ohio, a liberal arts college town of fewer than 3000 souls. Nola was attending talks by radical, organic farmers, spouting such polemics as, “Why does the government think a Hostess Twinkee is safer for our children to eat than fresh milk from a cow?”. They were sharing secrets to skirting the draconian laws against transporting raw milk across state lines. Did you know that you cannot sell raw milk products in this country as food? However you can sell it as fish bait by the pound (Fish Bait Colby anyone?).
It was Valentine’s weekend, so I drove down the next day, Saturday, with the children, and we stayed at an very nice and expensive inn and had a very tasty and expensive meal with our very tired and bored children. Then on Sunday, while Nola was learning how to make 6 figures raising organic, market gardens, I was somewhere down the highway in Columbus with the children, searching for a toy train expo I vaguely remembered reading about on the internet before I left Indiana. I did not know where to find it. For the sake of $20/month, my cell phone could access the internet, but I’m too cheap for a service I would use twice a year. Instead, I was relying on vague memory and the kindness of strangers. We did not have much success.
And then we passed a sign for a Tim Horton’s.
Which was Very Exciting for a Canadaphile such as myself.
Tim Horton’s is a chain of doughnut shops (and field police stations) all across Canada that I had read about. I did not know they had expanded to the United States. Being a connoisseur of homemade cake doughnuts, I had always wanted to try one, and there it was with time to spare. For the full experience, we ignored the drive-through and parked in the empty lot. The children crunched the dessicated piles of snow in the parking lot under foot, and I ushered them through the glass doors.
How sad, then, to find the meager, synthetic, doughnut-like objects in the display case . My romantic idea that doughnuts from Canada would be hearty, over-sized fuel for surviving frigid winters evaporated in the plastic shiny glare of pastries designed by a corporate efficiency expert. Oh Canada! Are you so insecure that you must copy your southern neighbor in this too?
Rose and Samuel went straight for the frosted ones with neon green and pink sprinkles. The counter help waited patiently with smiles, and having taken their time, I was too embarrassed to back out (see? wouldn’t I make a good Canadian?). I got the children what they wanted and ordered a plain cake doughnut for myself. On a whim, I mentioned our train expo dilemma, and the woman behind the counter was kind enough to look up the event on the internet for me.
Later, sitting at the Formica tables, I watched my children press a spilled, green sprinkle on each finger tip and lick them off one by one. I thought of Dawn, half an hour away, surrounded by a few hundred organic farmers, all plotting the demise of the very genetically modified organisms I was eating, and how very much more she would have enjoyed rubbing the sweet, drywall-texture crumbs off her teeth with her tongue.
Solomon February 10, 2010
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Wolcottville.add a comment
I woke this morning to the sound of my younger child crying – the loud, indignant cry of justice deferred. The sun was up, had been long up, somewhere behind the aluminum foil clouds. Six inches of snow down, six more to go sometime today, and they called us last night to say school would be closed. With no particular haste, I rose and put on my robe and headed out to play Solomon.
There were already several shrines of plastic toys set up about the house, including an interesting collection of hair accessories on the bathroom floor. I found both children in the lake room. Having heard the creaking of the carpeted floor boards, they had not moved or made a sound but waited for me to arrive. Each was clutching a handful of pickup sticks. The stubborn, angry expressions on their faces betrayed occasional slips of fear, and I could see the thoughts in their head as clearly as cartoon bubbles – will my case be strong enough to support my righteous anger in the court of Papa?
Fortunately for them, I was already awake, and Dawn had remained asleep. I can play Solomon as well as any dad, but if either of our sleep has been interrupted, the baby would really be cut in two.
Patiently I listened to each tell me their side of the story.
“He tried to grab the pickup sticks from me and when I wouldn’t give them, he kicked me and tried to bite me….”
“They were MY pickup sticks and when I tried to get them back, she made an angry, scary face at me…”
A woeful tale of property rights, assault, and battery. Neither showed any marks other than the lines of indignation on their brows. One story was much longer than the other, and neither agreed on any point of fact other than the involvement of pickup sticks.
Thus spake Solomon, “One or both of my offspring is prevaricating. Thou shalt remain in thy separate chairs, neither speaking, nor reading, nor diverting thy attention. Thou shalt not look to the right, neither to the left, until that thy separate histories shall concur with one another, verily, unto the meanest detail.”
Then I went to the bathroom to start my day.
Five minutes later I was back, and my children were still in their seats, though now draped across them like discard clothing, but quiet and bored rather than fighting.
“Would anyone like to alter or improve their story?” I asked.
Rose, my delightful motor mouth, can’t resist the opportunity to tell a story. “Papa, I’m going to tell you the WHOLE story this time. Samuel and I were playing Wallace and Gromit, and I was knitting the afghan with the pickup sticks like Gromit, and …” The convoluted story unfolded and it became clear that Rose had been on her way to put the sticks away when Sam decided he wanted them and the ruckus ensued. When she finished, Sam agreed with everything Rose said, so we discussed what should have been said or done instead and then gave apologies all around.
“Now,” I continued, “I’m going out to shovel the driveway. Would you like to go play in the snow while I do that?”
“YES! YES! But … Papa, can we have breakfast first?”
Toothpaste as art October 9, 2009
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Wolcottville.add a comment
This morning before school I left Rose in the bathroom to brush her teeth and get a bath while I went to do piano practice with Sam. After a few minutes of quiet from the bathroom, I yelled to Rose , “Are you brushing your teeth?” and she answered, very clearly and with the kind of proper enunciation one cannot achieve with a toothbrush in one’s mouth, “YES!” and then I immediately heard her electric toothbrush turn on.
Later, I came in to find her lying in a bathtub with the water running and filled up to about twice the normal height. I turned off the tub, finished her up, and got her out to dry off, but she said she had to pee. So she sat on the toilet, dripping onto the floor, while I turned to get the Aveeno lotion from the counter.
That’s when I saw a gel-like substance smeared all over the outside of the plastic drinking cup.
“Rose , what is this?” I asked. She stared at me with a scared, busted look on her face.
Repeat those last two sentences five times, because that’s what happened. Finally, she bowed her head, hid behind her hair, and said in a meek voice “toothpaste.”
Not even HER toothpaste. MY toothpaste! She had been painting with MY toothpaste all over the cup, the soap, and the sink, leaving a token deposit in the tube.
I did not find it particularly funny (as no doubt you do), but neither did I lose my temper. I told her to clean it up, which she did promptly and without complaint, and I let the matter drop. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
A Whole Yot September 26, 2009
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Wolcottville.1 comment so far
” I want a yot,” said my yittle boy. His four year old body has shed nearly every vestige of babyhood, but the y-l lisp still comes out now and then.
“A lot of what?” I asked him.
“No, a yot!”
“Yes, I heard you. A lot of what?”
“No, not a LOT.A YOT. A really big boat.”
“Oh! You mean a yacht!”
“Yes, I want a yot for my birthday… Or a dinghy.”
Spit Goes Clink January 16, 2009
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Wolcottville.Tags: electricity, emergency, power outage
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We lost power last night, from about 1:30 in the morning until 7:30.
Without electricity we have no lights, no heat (gas furnace controlled by electric thermostat), and no water (well pump is electric). I am writing this at 10:00 AM,and it is -14 Fahrenheit outdoors (yes, that says negative fourteen, or as Rose says, “megative fourteen” because it is worse than negative), so I don’t know how cold it was outside in the middle of the night. I shudder to think of it. Or maybe shiver. The house isn’t quite back up to operating temperature. We still have condensation frost on the inside of the windows.
I got up, found a flashlight, and called the power company. I left a message on their automated system and waited. I lit a few candles and read for a while, but after an hour, the temperature was noticeably dropping in the house. Samuel had a cold and woke easily, and so he ended up in bed with us, ensuring that neither Dawn nor I would get any sleep. I was up and down a number of times, unable to sleep but too tired and, increasingly, too cold to want to get up. We piled fleece blankets on the children and ourselves. Rose grunted when I asked if she was OK, but her head and hands feet felt warm.
And then I realized that if the house froze, there would be burst water pipes to deal with.
It was 4:00 in the morning. I called our landlady, but she didn’t know how to drain the water out of the pipes. She would try to find out and call me back.
“Meanwhile, can you leave some water running to keep the pipes from freezing?” she asked.
“No, the well pump is electric.”
“Oh… Yeah… Darn.”
I called the electric company and heard the reassuring recorded message that said there was a power outage in our area (and six other places) and crews were dealing with it. Later, I would feel very, very bad for those crews. But not right at that moment. At that moment, I wanted to urge them on with a cat-o-nine tails.
I also wanted to know how dire the situation was. At first I thought to get some water from the water cooler and stick an instant read thermometer in it. But then a few sluggish neurons woke up enough to say, “Hey stupid. Get the flashlight and look at the thermostat,” before rolling over back to sleep.
The thermostat read 60 degrees. 60 degrees? But it felt so cold in the house!
We decided to get ready to evacuate anyway, which raised another problem. The car was 75 yards away in a locked, detached garage. The garage door opener was electric and could not be opened from the outside. We would have to get inside the garage and manually open it, but the man door was locked and we didn’t know if we had a key. I put on fleece pants, a silk turtleneck, snow pants, fleece sweater, winter coat, a neck gaiter, Sorrell snow boots, a fleece touque (as our neighbors to the north say), and a down winter coat, and I walked outside with all the keys we could find in the house.
It occurred to me that this might be my first chance to have my spit freeze in mid-air, but I was too chicken to find out. I didn’t want my lips to freeze together.
We live on a “vacation” lake, so only a couple of house on our block still have people living in them at this time of year. However two doors down, I saw a station wagon with its lights on and my neighbor moving in and out. I went over to talk to him and found out that he was going to drive seven miles to town and look for a generator. His wife was leaving in their other car to drive to Fort Wayne and go to work three hours early. He asked if I had a cell phone, and I said yes, but it got no signal at the lake. Too bad, he said. He wanted to call ahead and see if anyplace was open. Why don’t you use your regular phone I said? He looked puzzled and then realized what I meant.
“All my phones are cordless and they need to be plugged into a socket to work.” I offered my phone but he decided to just go. But he did help me get my car out first. Turns out I did have a key to open the man door, and fortunately he was there to help because to open the garage door, we had to pull on two separate metal flaps, one on each end of the garage door.
So the car was available for a quick get away, if need be. I came inside, and was about to crawl back in bed when the landlady called back. She had not found out how to drain the water, but she was going out to buy a portable generator. I told her that the house was now at 55 degrees so there wasn’t any immediate danger.
I crawled into bed. Even Samuel’s involuntary spasms and twitches and kicks couldn’t keep me awake. But at 6:30 he woke up, as he does every morning, and wanted to get up and play. We said no about as firmly as we say No about anything, but he kept pleading until finally I said, “Sam, come with me.”
We had already covered him in fleece and warm layers, so I walked him into the room where all his toys were. It was very, very dark.
“Sam, the electricity is out. There is no power in the house. Do you think you can play out here in the dark?”
No answer. We went back to bed until the power came on at 7:30 in the morning. We gave a feeble cheer, and then I took Samuel to the playroom and fell asleep on the couch, wrapped in blankets.
An hour later, Rose woke up. She had no idea what had happened during the night, but she was pleased to hear that school had been canceled for the day.
Gunfire December 9, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Montpelier, Wolcottville.Tags: Ducks, Gunfire, Hunting, Sleep
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Saturday morning we woke to the sound of gunfire, a heavy explosive noise that somehow compressed and released the air in the room. Like a door slamming inches from your face, it was a sound that made you flinch and then take a inventory of your body parts for bruises and holes. It woke Sam, though he was probably already awake, lying on a small palette of pillows and sheets next to our bed. He is a night waker who seeks the comfort of our presence at two in the morning. He is also a twitcher and kicker whose has been banished numerous times from our bed, so the palette is a compromise. It allows him to sleep in the room with us when he needs to, but it does not require him to wake us. Unless of course, someone is firing a gun.
“Mama? What’s that noise? Mama, Papa. I heard something.”
He was reasonably calm, probably more calm than we were because he has little idea what it could be and because we hide our feelings better. It’s barely light outside, and soon Rose came in from the children’s bedroom too. She is six years old, which is an age of intellectual rebellion, a foretaste of adolescence, and as a late sleeper, she is usually surly most mornings having not yet discovered coffee. But not this morning. With a tinge of concern she was about to ask what that sound was, when suddenly we heard it again. Four loud explosions, two close together and two more staccato, that echo off the houses, garages, and trees. I was fully awake now. They did not appear to be directed at us, but they were close enough to rattle the windows on the far side of the house. Could they be coming from the lake?
Aloud, we suggested hunters and left unsaid any other possibilities that might upset the children and frighten ourselves. After all, this was rural Indiana. What other possible explanation was there? A couple of months earlier, we heard a single gunshot down the road while driving home that proved to be a neighbor ridding himself of a undesirable rodent, but unless this was a near-sighted octogenarian with a persistent and deaf ground hog, there were too many shots for that explanation. A domestic dispute was hardly likely, even among the few remaining tough retirees who chose not to migrate back to Fort Wayne for the winter. It was early December, too early for cabin fever – the weather had barked more than bitten. There was a meaningless dusting of snow still frosting the lawn and a thin sheen of ice had licked the edges of the lake. Gang warfare was out of the question. Most of the people beyond the lake were farmers, half of them Mennonites. And I was reminded of a joke.
Q. What is this? “Clip clop clip clop clip clop. BANG! BANG! Clip clop clip clop.”
A. An Amish drive-by shooting.
I kept this one to myself.
Dawngot out of bed and walked to the front of the house, meaning the side facing the lake, not the street. When you live on a small body of water, with houses crowding the shore in French long lots around the entire perimeter, the lake itself is the center of the community, not the various approach roads snaking about like veins. I was fully awake now and I followed but turned to the back of the house, because the front of our house was twenty feet from the water, and, product of the suburbs that I was, I could not conceive of someone swimming out into the water to fire a gun.
“It must be duck season,” I heard Dawn call from the other side of the house, and we all headed to the lake side parlor to watch a canoe paddler in camouflage green glide past our window. He slowed down and picked up a dead bird which he casually tossed, the feathers streaming an arc of lake water into the air, before landing on a large pile of fowl corpses in the front of the canoe. Scanning the 180 degree view, we spied a large collection of decoys at the south east corner of the lake, laid out in front of the cattails. The canoe headed slipped back into the cattails and disappeared behind a duck blind.
“Come on kids,” I said. “I’d like you to stay out of the lake room this morning.”
The lake room is the best room in the house, with a grand view, a CD player, the current peck of library books, and the most comfortable couches in the house, but the children made no fuss. Like me, they were paranoid of the unknown. The hunters weren’t aiming at the houses. Yet. I am a believer in not tempting fate.
I was also mildly peeved at the interruption to my sleep. Because of Jewish services and religious school, it we don’t get to sleep in really late on Saturday mornings, but at least we get an extra hour or two compared to the work week. Not that morning. And I liked the ducks, even though they pooped on the docks all summer, and I was sorry they were so near-sighted or love-sick or hungry or tired or just plain stupid to fly over Pretty Big Long Lake on a Saturday morning in duck season.
Staff Meeting October 12, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Wolcottville.add a comment
The announcement of a staff meeting in our office is always an unexpected diversion. Deadlines may prevent any gathering for up to half a year, only to overcorrect this lack of communication with a frenzy of weekly meetings that leave us exhausted and incommunicative. The pattern is oddly similar to my wife’s estrogen cycle before she had children. Both ought to have occurred monthly but did not. Both vanished without a trace with the application of sufficient environmental stress. Both were unpleasant facts of life, but accepted in the natural order of the world. When they appeared, we cheered the break from the mounting tedium, and when they were over, we cheered even louder. And they have one other thing inexplicably in common: after my vasectomy, I stopped fretting about them.
Yesterday’s staff meeting arrived with no warning at all, though I should confess that the fault may have been my own inattention. I received a message in our company chat room informing everyone that the sales team was meeting at 1:00 PM. Forty-five minutes later, I received a personal IM message politely inquiring when I was going to join. As a computer programmer, I am usually not considered part of the sales team, but I dialed in anyway.
We gathered in the meeting room in Seattle, a speaker phone as my proxy. We are a friendly cohort in general, but there was an additional comradery. We had not met as a company for several months, scourged and repressed by two very large and late projects which had superceded our virtual conversations around the water cooler.
They were now complete, after a fashion. Our projects are never truly complete, but they do get delivered, or at least, they sit on our network disks in a deliverable format until the client remembers they want them. If that sounds odd, consider that there are usually three clients involved in the process.
The first person is someone from the Business Office who really doesn’t understand software, who is blissfully ignorant of the technical details, but who is responsible for providing the purchase order. In theory, we are not obliged to start a project without a PO. The PO is the client’s written promise to pay us when we deliver. Thus it makes no sense to deliver, or even begin construction, until we have a PO in hand. In theory, we could complete an entire software project, deliver and install it, and send someone from our office to sit in one their cubicles and run it for them (and we have done all these things at times), and still the client wouldn’t have to pay us unless we got the PO. So when we are especially busy, not having a PO would certainly offer a good excuse for delaying a project, which in theory would be awfully convenient at times, and very legally, though perhaps not strictly (ahem) ethical. So much for theory. The reality is that they PO is always late, sometimes months late, sometimes even years late, and often the best way to get the PO delivered is to call the business office and tell them that the project is done, sitting in our mail room, gathering dust and (worse yet) growing obsolete.
The second person involved is someone from the Information Technology Department. This person is responsible for installing and running the code. This person is usually the overworked, underpaid guru of the organization, though just as often they are a hapless and incompetent victim of the Peter Principle. In either case, once the code is delivered to them, it will sit on their desk until they have time to install it. The amount of time varies enormously.
The third person is a middle manager who ordered the project in the first place. This person is the only one who cares, who wanted the code yesterday, who calls every week or every day to see how the project is coming along, who name appears on our caller ID more and more frequently as deadline approaches. They are usually the person who can motivate the other two people to action once the code is deliverable.
So at the beginning of our staff meeting, there were two such projects, one delivered and one deliverable, and life was sweet. The conversation around the table bubbled. Not a single person had a monkey on their back. Those clients whose every whim must be catered and who sadistically provide our provender, they now had the monkeys on their backs, those capricious and obnoxious project monkeys, fond of throwing their excrement about as monkeys will do.
Our meetings are usually round-robin presentations. Our boss then summarizes and brings up topics germaine to the company as a whole. There were two new employees, swelling our ranks by 25%, so that the meeting ended up taking more time than usual. My proxy phone huddled in the corner, occasionally making a noise of consent in chorus with the others, or even an obnoxious buzz whenever a client called for help cleaning monkey excrement, but otherwise remaining quiet and unobtrusive. By dint of which, I successfully avoided my turn and shaved perhaps five minutes off the meeting.
Then our boss did something uncommon. He gave us an overview of the current financial sector melt down as he saw it, what he thought would happen in the future, both to the world as a whole and to our company in particular. He had studied this sort of thing in school and followed it diligently in the papers. He used a word – “engaging” or “fascinating” or such – that conveyed his enthusiasm for the the topic without appearing callous at the suffering of million of homeless innocents. He reminded us that the company had been through tough times before with 9-11 and the dotcom bust, and he thought we would weather this storm too. In the past, we had become Hoovermatics, sucking up every crumb of project work available and getting any dime a customer might have to spend before someone else got it, because there wasn’t likely to be a second dime. It wasn’t to that point now, though clearly he thought the situation would worsen before improving. Even if it did get that bad, he didn’t anticipate any lay offs.
Then he solicited general comments. There are two MBAs on staff with a third on the way, and several intelligent, childless employees who have time to read the New York Times through page C34 every day. They all had opinions. This was before the election, and some mentioned the problems that would face the Next president, whomever that might be. Others mentioned quieter events in the world that indicated the magnitude of the problem more than the front page articles. Ten minutes later we still dissecting the corpse of the American financial establishment, when my boss said, “Harry, are you still there?”
I stopped trimming my fingernails.
“I sure am.”
“Have you any comments to offer?”
“Umm. Not really. Except to say, that I’m glad I sold my house when I did, which was about two months before the bottom fell out, and glad I moved to a place with one of the cheapest costs of living in the US.”
There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone, and I realized that at least one person in the room had recently bought a house which was already worth tens of thousands of dollars less than what he paid for it. I bit my lip, which was a neat trick with my foot in my mouth, but of course you can’t see that on a conference phone.
“Yes,” said my boss. “You know, I really need to consult with you about business decisions more often.”
The Lake September 30, 2008
Posted by Matthew in Biography, Wolcottville.add a comment
We live right on a lake, which for the purposes of the journal I shall call “Pretty Big Long Lake.” I can stand on the back porch and, if not actually spit into it, at least toss acorns to the end of the pier. The daily 4 km circumvention takes about 40 minutes if I don’t stop to chat with neighbors – the shore is replete with them and their small summer fishing homes. There is hardly a day, summer and winter, where there is not at least one person coaxing fish from it.
I had always dreamed of philosophizing by an ocean, not a lake. A lake is confining, insular, a panorama that fits neatly in a Kodak, whereas no contemplation is too large for an ocean view. A strand of the Atlantic (or the Pacific, I’m not too choosy), white canvas trousers, a windbreaker, the white foam of the surging waves, one hand in a pocket and the other holding a mug of tea (though I hardly ever drink tea), and the forlorn cry of a gull occasionally breaking into my profoundly satisfying daydreams.
But the sleep-deprived daydreams of a parent of young children are not much more profound than that of a family pet – sleep, food, a scratch behind the ear, more sleep. A lake is a more than adequate mirror for such reflections.
On a clear day, after the morning vapors have dispersed, you can scan the shore and see the piers of all one hundred of your neighbors, a huddled fraternity of planking invading the domain of the lily pads, cat tails, and duck weed. A tossed pebble settles into the greasy, black mud and startles the translucent blue and green fish, each no longer than your finger. The water is clean and crystal clear. You can walk out farther than most people can swim and it does not get deeper than your knees. You could easily walk out and retrieve your stone. The mud would stir and swirl as you passed, filling the water like the ink of a frightened octopus. The prehistoric slime on the soles of your bare foot is an acquired taste, and no doubt an ocean shore would feel more cleansing, but I have a lake, not an ocean.
The legal speed limit on the lake is 10 miles per hour. You may swim, paddle, peddle, sail, motor, or captain any vehicle if you do not exceed 10 miles per hour. The de facto enforcer is the Department of Natural Resources who maintains the quality of the water and the public boat launch, but de jure it is the good opinion of the folks who live here, many of them year round, and who fish this lake in a sustainable manner. You may rev your jet ski up to 9.99 miles per hour, but if you scare the fish away with your noise and acrid exhaust, you jeopardize the integrity of your truck tires left behind at the boat launch. I’m not saying I know anyone personally who would do this, but slashing happens.
Altogether, it is the perfect lake for teaching my nervous, uncoordinated children how to swim. From the dock they can see through the clear water and watch the fish shadows darken the sandy veneer over the mud. They can wade in slowly, wetting ankles, shins, knees, thigh, bottoms, and bellies at a slow crawl from the shore to the end of the dock to which they cling. They leave trails of dark mud clouds behind them, like the stirred dregs of unfiltered tea in a cup. They can float, swim, kick, splash about, and they need only settle their feet on the bottom and stand up to feel safe. Samuel could even stand in the water at the end of the dock with his head easily above water, not that he would ever venture out that far.
Rose on the other hand is braver. She considered herself a swimmer before we moved here, though she cannot swim the length of a bathtub. That does not stop her. She snaps on her goggles, ducks her head under, thrashes her legs and one arm (the other arm pinching her nose tightly) and propels herself a noisy five feet before standing up, spitting copiously, and wiping the water from her face and eyes with her hands.
“Did you see me swimming?” she crows and jumps in again.
This only recently, since the very day we arrived in Indiana, she broke her arm, and for six weeks could not get the cast wet. The water was cold now, and though the days can still get up to the 70′s, the nighttime thermometer had already flirted once with the freezing point. The children understood that swimming days were numbered, and they did not miss an opportunity to be outside and in the water.
Of course we had set rules, the more important being that no one may go on the dock or in the water without an adult present. This rule had only been challenged twice, each time resulting in an immediate cessation of outdoor play followed by a prolonged, grating, spiteful period of complaint, not unlike that of disturbed mallards. But since then, we had not had any rule breaking.
Last weekend, the temperature was warm, though not quite warm enough for swimming. The children asked very nicely to play in the sand instead, and I agreed to go out with them. No swimsuits. Just pails and shovels and a plastic two handled cup formerly used for ritual handwashing. The children launched from the door like uncaged animals, shrieking and running for five minutes before settling down to the first of many plans of action. As a family, we really spend too much time indoors, and we all quickly forget how expansive the outside world is. Buckets of water were brought to the sand pit for castle and cake making. I yelled reminders. No running onto the dock and don’t step barefoot in the duck poop.
“Papa, can we sweep it off the dock?”
“Yes. Go get the broom.”
Rose returned and make a good first pass, but the broom was too large for her, so I took a turn. I was nearly done with the first dock (there are two) when I heard a scream and a splash, followed by even more screaming. I looked up and saw Samuel’s head – wet, miserable, spluttering, screaming my name – rising above the far side of the other dock. Rose was manic, running towards me, babbling, unstrung, abandoning Samuel.
“Papa! Papa! Come quick! Samuel fell in the water and it’s my fault!” and she bursts into tears.
Clearly, no one was in immediate danger of drowning. Samuel stood in the lake with water up to his chest about ten feet from the shore. He could have walked back to shore, entered the cabana, and ordered some towels and a cup of hot tea had he the presence of mind, but of course at three years old he did not. I hustled over to the other dock and pulled him out. The sun was shining and the air was reasonably warm, so I stripped off his soaking shirt, while he spat out lake water.
“Papa! Rose pushed me in the lake!”
It was all her fault, she confessed with unusual and vehement candor. She had been running down the dock (breaking rule number 2), and tried to run around Samuel, but through an act of simultaneous uncoordination, unlikely in theory but strangely common to my children, they bumped into each other instead. That was the whole story, but it took her about five minutes to say it clearly. Meanwhile I calmed Samuel down and herded him to the house where Dawn, having heard the noise and divined the problem, was waiting with towels and fresh clothes.
“Papa! Rose pushed me in the lake!”
“Well, Samuel, I think it was an accident,” and then I gently reminded Rose that regardless, she owed Sam an apology. Parental reminders like these, no matter how sensitively given, inspire rote, insincere responses which were delivered with a noticeable lack of attention.
“Imsorrysamuel.”
“Thatsokayrose.”
Then turning to me, Samuel added, “Papa, Rose pushed me into the lake.”
He repeated this a dozen more times while we stripped him, bathed him, and changed his clothes. He was not angry or upset with Rose. The repetition was simply an attempt to make sense of an acute, systemic insult that arrived without warning. But Rose took it as accusation, and having uncharacteristically confessed her crime, she was now without recourse to deny it. So instead she kept bursting into tears and talking. We assured her that Samuel was perfectly fine, that she was not in trouble, that it was an understandable accident. But she couldn’t stop talking about it anyway.
As a child, I earned the nickname Motor Mouth because I often gave a complete narration of my thoughts with an interrupting commentary that came out as a great many incomplete sentences at high speed. I’m sure I was incomprehensible, but I had not yet developed a filter in my brain to keep thoughts inside. I believe my daughter has inherited this … oh let’s say attribute, as defect is such an ugly word. When she gets going, it is difficult to pay attention to much or even anything she is saying. As Tom Lehrer once said, “If a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to Shut Up.” But her intensity over this event was so dramatic and persistent, even for a six year old, that I listened with as much attention as I could muster over the cross-grain of Samuel’s own repetitive chatter.
Which is why, for once, I did not miss her key sentence.
“But Papa! I thought … I thought … I thought Samuel had drowned!”
In retrospect, this was obvious, but at the time, it had seemed so comical to me that I did not appreciate how deadly serious it had seemed to Rose. I swallowed the first words that came to me (“that’s why we keep telling you not to run on the docks”) and instead pulled her into a hug and said simply, “Your brother didn’t drown. He’s perfectly OK, and he was never in any danger.”
She clung to me and soaked my shoulder with warm, noisy tears. I felt that, on the one hand, I had said the right thing to her, or had at least not said the wrong thing. But on the other hand, I grew up with only brothers, not sisters, and I really wondered if I would ready in six years for parenting a teenage girl.
